Shanghaied - 2ACW

A lot of people would argue different though!

The worse is coming for Padley. Imagine being disowned by your family. Yes I was correct about the Feds not being lenient towards the grandmother. All while Stokes enjoy using racism to influence the court verdict.
Also, Chen is basically the harbringer of doom of the Second American Civil War.

If you read my intermission chapter A Republican In The Sea of Blue, 30 year old Alyssa Theodore was one of those descent Americans within the DAR. In my story, she pledges her allegiance to D.C. while being in the middle of DAR territory.

Chen is basically like those alt-right posters on 4chan during the 2015-2016 Meme War and the CNN Meme Wars of 2017. Except she is more dangerous. Whereas those normies just post memes for trolling at their enemies, Chen literally does something that ruins people's lives.

I have feeling the Second American Civil War will end really bloody for the DAR. Knowing the U.S. will not tolerate any more concessions after the Taiwan Conflict, I could see the DAR eventually be reabsorbed back. Then finally Americans should know the true threat in this dystopian scenario is the People's Republic of China which along with America's adversaries are benefiting from the civil war.

157 – Twenty-two cities

The first contact made through Carrillo talking to ex-Senator Berman when the two of them were down in Mexico had the Democratic American Republic propose a ceasefire in-place between the two warring parties. President Mitchell had rejected the idea out of hand. The United States wouldn’t give in, he told his top people, not in any circumstances. That was before the massive defeat incurred by his armies in Arizona yet was his position in the aftermath of that too. Along with the ceasefire offer made through such intermediaries, there had been the handover from that drug smuggler whom President Pierce had later so thoroughly turned on. The United States had been handed details of traitors to their country who the DAR had decided to sell out. None of them were high-level nor had done much of any real significance to harm the war effort. Nonetheless, the DAR threw such people to the wolves. The Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defence Department went for those traitors and found that every single one of them was as guilty as accused. For the DAR to do that, to give up the names of people and their activities, had been quite the shock when it first came yet was soon understood for why it was done. The intention was to establish bona fides for Carrillo as someone who could be dealt with. Mitchell had had no wish to work with that man and, in the end, after a time, neither had Pierce either: a fusillade of Hellfires from drones above Culiacán was how he cut ties with him.

When the DAR had handed over Padley, and the captive Gibson too, in Arizona to the United States Army, there was another one of those packages delivered full of the names of people and what they had done. That was something unasked for but given nonetheless. On that second occasion though, there wasn’t the revelations of unknown traitors to the United States but instead a collection of files on captives held by the DAR which it wished to hand over for the US Government to do as as it felt fit with them. Of the three dozen plus figures, one of them was quite something in terms of a prize for the United States yet that didn’t mean that the others with less of a profile meant nothing. Among the captives presented ready to be given over, the DAR was willing to see Al Roach returned to the United States. He was a high-ranking DHS employee specialising in domestic extremism and had been in Colorado at the very end of January when the US Army retook the eastern portions of that state. Roach raped and murdered a female co-worker, then killed a security contractor too before fleeing to the DAR: they didn’t want him for the defector he said he wanted to be. Colonel Marcos Iberico Bravo was another name on the list. Pre-war, Iberico was a US Air Force Reserve officer who lived in New Mexico but who had answered the recall to uniform for the DAR rather than the United States. He was serving as an intelligence officer when, for no discernable reason, he personally executed five US Marines being held as EPWs in quite the brutal fashion. Iberico had been held on war crimes charges by the DAR yet they knew that the United States was aware of him murdering those unarmed captives and had been seeking him too. Those were just two examples of many. Then there came the big fish. Maria Arreola Rodriguez was someone whom the DAR was willing to hand over where she was sought on treason charges.

A communique from Pierce personally had been in that package passed to the commander of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment for him to send up the command chain. The DAR’s second president – like the first, elected by no one – addressed Mitchell and requested that the fighting between the two nations come to an end. He offered all of those prisoners as a component of the opening of a settlement between the DAR and the United States, mentioning MAR especially and assuring Mitchell that he would keep his word: Padley’s deliverance was said to be proof of his ability to deliver. Pierce talked in that communique of how the battlefield of the Second American Civil War had seen a general stalemate occur where the front-lines had moved back to near where they were at the beginning of the fighting. His country had defended its independence and would continue to successfully do that: Pierce was certain that the DAR was unable to be defeated. Glow-worm was mentioned too. As far as Pierce was concerned, so said that message anyway, that was a Twenty-First Century weapon for a Twenty-First Century war. It wasn’t something that killed people and was also a weapon of which the effects were war-winning. Mitchell was reminded that that computer virus had moved beyond the battlefield where the two Americas were fighting each other in the West and had directly affected the war-making capacity of the United States elsewhere. It would keep on ruining national defence systems with abandon too. There was a solution to that though, an answer to infection. The DAR was willing to give away the secret to stopping Glow-worm from doing any more damage and also begin the process of reversing what it already had knocked out of action in terms of the most modern weapons of war.

Pierce wanted in exchange for the Democratic American Republic to be treated as an equal. The United States must recognise its secession and legality. The fighting would end quickly once that happened and a long-term peace deal could be worked out where future diplomatic relations, later economic ones too, could be sorted out. The DAR wanted what all territory it laid claim though. Pierce’s message acknowledged the loss of Hawaii but stated that all of Colorado and New Mexico, both with portions under United States’ control, belonged to his country. He was willing to accept a phased withdrawal from those states, one which would come with a release of POWs held in the DAR for each bit. There was an outline of a plan for exchanges of military prisoners between the two nations as well. Civilian captives held by each side were a different matter but Pierce said that the example of co-operation in exchanges he was willing to set by handing over his predecessor would assure the United States that he could be trusted to deal honestly with that.


Almost a week was spent with discussions in the White House about how to respond. The initial idea to keep everything secret was smashed apart when Pierce made that broadcast to his people announcing that a comprehensive peace deal had been offered. Padley then being in United States custody, with the questions over where she came from, let everyone know that something serious was going on. Former officials first from the Walsh Administration, then from the Mitchell Administration too, followed by Republican elected officials nationwide as well, all made those public statements that the war was lost and whatever Pierce had offered on behalf of the DAR needed to be something considered. Mitchell faced at the same time the criticism coming in from other quarters at the very idea that he could even consider for a moment anything coming out of the regime in Las Vegas. Those outsiders didn’t know all that was on offer but didn’t think they needed to: all that mattered was the sanctity of the union with was the fifty-state United States and the desire to eliminate secession and the traitors who had brought that about. When Maddie Chen started blogging about the DAR’s deposed first president being on the negotiating table as someone Pierce had offered up, there was a grave concern in the White House that Pierce’s communique had been leaked, even in part. It took some time to understand that Chen was just making an educated guess there: it was not her hearing something on the sly but instead her jumping to the right conclusion.

Mitchell had people inside his administration, and on the edges of it but who couldn’t be ignored, both willing to see an end to the war with the West and those absolutely opposed to any suggestion of such a thing.

There senior Cabinet members on his national security team were all for ending the war though not necessarily on those terms presented by Pierce. They headed up big, important government departments and their influence mattered a lot. Attorney General Gunnarsson, SecState Renzi and Mitchell’s Treasury Secretary Lamar Marshall told him that the time had come to talk rather than fight a war which wasn’t just lost but was causing potentially irreversible damage even worse than secession and civil war had. In opposition to them there were more numerous top-tier figures arguing with them that the war must continue. SecDef Darby, Admiral Miller from the DHS and new Vice President Cruz all stood firm against even talking with Pierce let alone giving him anything he wanted. The same came from outside the administration where US House Speaker Fraser, joined by the new Senate Majority Leader Lori Oakes (she was from Ohio and had replaced the ‘ill’ Senator Green), would likewise have none of that. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Hutchinson, like Darby a Westerner from out of the Pacific North-West, wasn’t a direct part of the national security team but he was aware of what was going on and led a group of another four lower-level Cabinet secretaries who all made their president aware that they wouldn’t go along with any ceasefire, dealing with the DAR in any way and especially not accepting the loss of the West.

Apart from the emotional arguments against accepting defeat, Mitchell was presented with other reasons not to. Miller warned that the Glow-worm virus could have an undetected later component to it. There could be a logic bomb in it where, even when reversed, at a later date it could spring back into action again even when though eliminated. Should the United States at a later point need to go back to fighting that DAR for whatever reason, including Pierce’s territorial aggression, it could start destroying war-making capacity again. The code to do that might be in any solution to stop its first wave. Or, there was always the chance that the virus might strike again, Pierce might claim innocence yet ‘help’ might be offered in exchange for other concessions down the road. When questions were raised about the validity of such a possible outcome, Miller told those who asked that was what he could do in the same situation and the DAR had already tricked the United States twice over the same weapon too. Fraser told his president that accepting defeat would doom the Republicans election-wise. Their party would be f*cked for the long-term by being in power, holding all three branches of government, when an acceptance came of defeat against a domestic foe such as the DAR. While that didn’t go down well with all those who heard it due to its naked partisanship, they were all Republicans after all. Darby and Hutchinson didn’t want to see all their fellow Westerners who didn’t support the DAR, a majority of the population out there and not just Republican voters either so they said, abandoned either. That was just wrong. They thought it would be the ultimate betrayal.

It was Oakes who raised the ‘nuclear option’ in response to Pierce’s offer. New in her position she was, but she was a long-time Republican national political figure and a hard-liner at that. Throughout the entire crisis starting with the first talk of New America & a Second Republic made by those angry at the US Supreme Court’s verdict in relation to the 2028 Presidential Election, she had been vocal in the Senate calling for military action. Her demands had accelerated faster than events themselves with Oakes being one of the first to call for military action even before the secessionist DAR was formed. She wanted to see nukes used against Pierce. She wasn’t arguing for a city-busting attack but rather a targeted strike against him, his top regime figures and the DAR military. To those who heard her talk of a nuclear strike on American soil against fellow Americans, even the Mitchell Administration people who were adamant that no settlement should come, there was only horror at that idea. The woman was nuts, they couldn’t believe that her fellow senators had positioned her where they had following the shocking departure of Green.

The Chair of the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Adviser both reminded her of that intel pulled from Las Vegas back in February where one of Padley’s top aides (back when she still had her power out there) had defected to the United States with a treasure trove of information. There was a confirmed nuclear counter-stroke plan outline that the DAR had should it be attacked first. They had that Trident-armed nuclear submarine at sea with twenty-four SLBMs pointed at the United States ready to fire if their country was attacked first. Any counter-force strike, even a very limited attack at that, would be met with full retaliation in a counter-value over-the-top return… so said that intel anyway. Twenty-two American cities were targeted along with US Strategic Command HQ at Omaha and the King’s Bay nuclear submarine base in Georgia too.

General Dowd read out the names of those cities even through Oakes’ attempts at interruption to say it wasn’t a credible threat:
Washington DC,
New York City (NY),
Atlanta (GA),
Boston (MA),
Buffalo (NY),
Charlotte  (NC),
Chicago (IL),
Cincinnati (OH),
Dallas (TX),
Detroit (MI),
Houston (TX),
Kansas City (MO),
Memphis (TN),
Miami (FL),
Milwaukee (WI),
Minneapolis (MN),
New Orleans (LA),
Philadelphia (PA),
Pittsburgh (PA),
San Antonio (TX),
St. Louis (MO),
and Tampa (FL).

That silenced Oakes and her notion of making a strike first. It concentrated minds on just what the United States was dealing with when it came to an illegal regime within its own internationally recognised borders armed with nuclear weapons who said that they had them pointed at such places. Each missile was a MIRV too with multiple warheads meaning that any attempt to try and stop even a portion of that attack, with defences already crippled by Glow-worm interference, was impossible. To have a sub with targeting orders like that, risking Armageddon, was madness: everyone could agree on that. Not all of them knew though that the US Navy had its own subs at sea with missiles targeted against cities in the West though. Those ones out there had been below the ocean since before the war started and were not affected by Glow-worm due to a complete cut-off in any form of uplink before nor after the virus was unleashed. Should the DAR ever make a nuclear attack like that, the cities of the west would be left as piles of ash too. Mutually Assured Destruction was there to make sure that ideas such as those of Oakes when it came to dealing with the DAR by using targeted nukes was completely out of the question.

Nuclear warfare on American soil wasn’t what Mitchell wanted his top people to be talking about though. There was that peace proposal on the table. It was one which Pierce had presented where his country would get its independence and its territory. POWs would be exchanged and other captives too. The killing, where the total in terms of deaths was by late-March believed to have gone past twenty-five thousand direct military deaths (civilians not included), would end. The United States would supposedly see a reversal in the utterly destructive computer virus ravaging its military forces yet have to face the complete humiliation of a defeat like that. The humiliation would come with a good chunk of the country with tens of millions of people, immense natural resources and other wealth being granted to a power-mad dictator leading a regime which had been established against all law and morals. There would be certain immense unrest elsewhere across the country in reply to any settlement because so many people just wouldn’t accept that; America was fifty states, never dividable and all united to so many. The United States’ world position would be fatally wounded, sure to unravel even more problems than it already faced too.

Mitchell had people around him who believed that the war had to be ended because it was impossible to continue it, even doing more damage than seeing it end. He also had those who stated an utmost refusal to see what they viewed as a surrender of all that their country was meant to be. The choice of what to do was his to make.

It's the same as the U.S. Armed Forces but they ditched the Stars and Stripes patch for the Red, Blue, and White Cross (Flag of the DAR). They didn't have time to redesign the uniforms, flags, insignias, and aircraft roundels so the Council of Thirteen decide to keep it simple as of the moment.

158 – Beyond the Black Gate

The streaming service provided by Amazon had finished the showing the penultimate season of its Lord of the Rings prequel right before Christmas 2028. Certainly not as high brow as the original novel nor anything like the films released in the Noughties, the show was watched by tens of millions of Americans – and more around the globe too – with it entering pop culture discourse extensively. When fighting in Arizona during March 2029, young soldiers in the service of the United States had been said to be battling the armies of Mordor. That influence initially came from outside, from back home, where the best wishes of so many were sent in video messages paying homage to those on the front-lines fighting against ‘evil’. Defeat came to those in Arizona, but elsewhere the same thing was picked up by more of those on the front-lines. To be fighting the valiant fight against such a foe raised morale and that was needed. Troops themselves created videos, memes and such like about the fight which they were involved in. To those positioned along the eastern side of the Rockies through Colorado, and then deep inside the mountains in select places, they regarded the terrain in which they fought as being the outer defences of the fictional Mordor. Several different locations were given the name ‘the Black Gate’ due to the inability to get past mountainous features and the knowledge of what was beyond those passes and such like. One of those was considered to be the Monarch Pass within the Sawatch Range, deep inside the Rockies and on the Continental Divide itself. The worst of the winter weather had gone yet the whole area was very inhospitable to the soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Infantry Brigade (the Patriots) in that area who had control everywhere east and northeast of the Monarch Pass but could go no further forward. Their parent division was assigned to the US IX Corps – with troops through Montana, Wyoming & Colorado – and spread out far. Advancing forward wasn’t an official corps priority mission because there were only more mountains in the way all for the defenders to make use of, but there was still fighting every day and night with localised engagements. During late-March, while discussions went on back in DC over the fate of the overall war, those serving with the Patriots near to the Monarch Pass and up through the Upper Arkansas River Valley faced a new opponent. Marine reservists in the service of the secessionist Democratic American Republic – stretched ever so thin – were replaced by Californian national guardsmen. The wartime-raised 49th Infantry Brigade moved in to not just bar the way ahead but edge forwards themselves with orders to come down off the mountains and take that valley below them.

Those who had been held back far from that Black Gate were on the receiving end of a localised major offensive in a previous relatively quiet sector of the front-lines. The Patriots didn’t come out of that fight well. Towards Salida first then Buena Vista before finally moving on Leadville in the north, the 49th Infantry Brigade pushed forward and made steady progress. They undertook battalion-level night-time attacks to take ground carefully through the use of liberal fire-power rather than sending those second-rate reservists & retirees under command forward into the firing line unsupported. Through the Monarch Pass and along US Highway-50 rolled tanks to support the southernmost push. It should have been impossible for those old M-1A1 Abrams’ taken from storage and crewed by those national guardsmen after a few month’s refresher training to do that. US air power should have wiped them out when they were exposed on the roadway. No air attacks came though. The DAR troops and tanks had their own air support too. Low-flying jets, drones and helicopters covered that push from out of the Monarch Pass and the other two advances made on foot which followed to also reach the valley. There were A-10s flying low and slow firing their cannons and launching rockets to be joined by flights of Apache gunships darting about unleashing their own weapons. Armed drones, especially small ones, were employed in support of the 49th Infantry Brigade too where they scouted first then attacked the positions of those in the firing line. Shells and rockets were fired by DAR artillery units located in the rear. Getting howitzers and MLRS systems up into the mountains was no easy feat to allow for the 49th Infantry Brigade to have on-hand fire support and those systems should have, like the tanks, been easy meat for US air power… had that been available.

Countering the advances made to force them back, or worse to trap them in the valley for destruction, the Patriots brought to bare every weapon that they did have at-hand. No A-10s, Apaches nor Gray Eagles flew to aid them but they had tanks and artillery support. Their own attached Abrams’ (Tennessee national guardsmen) and heavy guns (divisional units plus support from a National Guard unit out of South Dakota) were brought into play. The tanks, identical M-1A1s, preformed well yet there were soon problems with the artillery. Glow-worm struck again. The guns themselves could still function when the computer systems became unreliable and there were artillery observers, though so much of the artillery operations were dependant on computer support. When the systems became unreliable to link the full artillery support team as one to function without interruption, everything slowed down to have to be done the old-fashioned way. That could be done, and was, but it took time. Those on the other side of the fight had no such delays to their systems. It became yet another advantage for the DAR Army on the attack where their Rockies Corps unit engaged in pushing forward to seize that valley were able to achieve their goals. The Patriots had to give ground which they should have been able to defend when their own fire support was so limited and their opponents had it in abundance. Salida was a major communications centre at the south end of the valley and it fell. Buena Vista remained in US hands but when Leadville was also lost, the Patriots were ordered to withdraw from there in the middle as well. After three nights of fighting, the entire valley was taken.

Much of the Patriots got out of the valley and retreated into the mountain slopes away to the east. That wasn’t uniform though. Those serving with the brigade’s 2/2 INF took a beating around Salida with half of the battalion lost. Groups of soldiers who had for so long been barred entry through the Black Gate which was the Monarch Pass were cut-off in the retreat when DAR tanks got forward. One party of soldiers got lost and went northwest, not northeast as they were meant to, and ran into a trio of young men in civilian attire armed to the teeth. It was almost like Red Dawn with the Arapaho National Forest not that far off! Those twenty-something aged guerrillas showed the soldiers the way out and got them to safety before returning to their own fight. Colorado was somewhere infested with partisans such as them. Not all of them fighting against the DAR (as that trio were) had been friendly towards US troops either. Lawlessness reigned in many places, especially in areas considered no man’s land through so many portions within the Rockies between two great armies fighting for different versions of what their political masters wanted the whole of America to be.


Denver was far behind the lines, well inside US-liberated territory after its fall to federal forces back at the very end of January. Acting Governor Jennifer Webb was there at the end of March in the state’s capital. She had been Colorado’s lieutenant-governor and had refused to go along with the governor’s secession from out of the United States to take the state into the DAR. David Rowan had re-established a seat of power across in Grand Junction, a town not far from the Utah state line, and continued to claim that he was the real Governor of Colorado. As to Webb, her governorship was possible because the eastern, more-populated regions of the state were under US military control. She had returned from where she had fled to in Wyoming when Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo etc. had been liberated. The full powers of her office weren’t something that she had though.

Colorado remained under partial martial law. Webb spent everyday fighting against that. She didn’t use soldiers as Rowan had done pre-secession but instead the law. She supported the re-establishment of United States rule in her state. However, that shouldn’t have included the night-time curfews, everyday restrictions on travel and such like which were present throughout the liberated areas. There had been DAR special forces operations in the rear and also the presence of rebel gunmen, yet Webb didn’t regard neither as requiring what looked in many ways like an armed occupation over American civilians. It was unconstitutional, she had the lawyers argue, and just plain wrong too. The dispute went on with those back in DC believing that Webb was showboating for her own political gain in Colorado. It was considered there in the Mitchell Administration and over at the (dispersed) Defence Department too that the situation on the ground was at a minimum level of disruption for ordinary Americans there… people who were being defended by soldiers fighting and dying in the Rockies to keep them free from the terrors of the DAR back in control.

Webb flew to DC on March 30th to see for herself how things were progressing with lawyers employed by the state arguing before the US Supreme Court over the matter. She had seen recordings of the proceedings where Colorado was asserting its constitutional rights and listened to the lawyer’s explanations but sought to get an on-the-ground feel for things. She was a Democrat yet had opposed secession from other Democrats back in January. Nonetheless, when in DC, she on several occasions faced verbal abuse of a partisan nature and then also met strong opposition to her trying to assert the ‘state’s rights’ issue: Rowan had done that and it wasn’t something that anyone had forgotten. Webb spent most of her time in DC defending her state and its people in a whole serious of uncomfortable situations from people who said that Coloradoans should be practically on their knees begging forgiveness for what they had done yet got in terms of their liberation. Right before she left she had a meeting with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Webb and Scott Hutchinson (he from Oregon) had once worked together at a Chicago law firm many years beforehand. Hutchinson hosted a lunch meeting and told her at that something he wasn’t supposed to know let alone reveal. Webb was informed that in the peace proposal submitted by the DAR, which in the White House they were at that time considering, Colorado had been demanded by President Pierce to be handed back to the DAR. The whole of Colorado at that. President Mitchell’s Cabinet secretary told Webb he was fighting against that, and everything else to do with giving the DAR anything including the right to exist, yet he worried that Mitchell might agree to end the war by selling out Colorado.

Never! Webb told her old colleague that she would fight to the bitter end to stop anything like that. She flew back to Denver trying to consider how to make sure that that would never happen.